Wednesday, July 23, 2008

WotLK Beta - Protection

I got fed up with trying to figure out Judgement of Command, so I specced Protection to try out some new talents. Some thoughts in no particular order:

Wow, there are a lot of talents in the Prot tree. I spent all 61 points, and I still wanted to spend 10 more. Prot really needs a couple of talents in the high end collapsed, and maybe a couple PvP-dedicated talents in their place.

I'm running out of space to put all my icons. 3 Judgements, Hammer of the Righteous, Seal of the Martyr, and at 75 we get Shield of Righteousness. It's all putting a squeeze on the available bar space I have.

Hammer of the Righteous is broken at the moment. Admittedly, I'm using a caster weapon, but my character sheet says 116-213 damage, and I'm seeing white hits of 76-132. I run up to a mob, smack HotR, and it does a whopping 35 damage!

HotR does anywhere from 35-120 damage, so I think it's bugged at the moment. As well, I haven't yet seen it crit. Admittedly, I have a pretty low crit rate in Prot gear, but I did test it a fair bit.

The new cast time on Avenger's Shield is very nice. The dazed duration has increased to 10s, which is nice because it slows down the pull in a group. On the other hand, it takes forever for the mob to actually get to you.

Protection plays pretty much like always does. Gather mobs, Consecrate, Holy Shield, and lots of numbers appear on your screen. For solo play, I think it might be a bit mana-hungry.

The really interesting question will be Spell Power versus Attack Power gear. To a large extent this depends on how HotR works. Touched by the Light gives a fair bit of spell power to keep your SP-based spells from falling behind.

So that was my quick look at Protection. Some interesting things going on with it, but so far it seems very similar to TBC Protection.

However, take note that you can now use Judgement of Wisdom (which should also give more mana per proc) on top of your damage seal without losing any (or as much) damage potential, which should help a lot of the mana issues.

But I agree with some of your other points, Rohan. I've been playing around with the talent calculator lately trying to find a spec I like for my Prot Pally, and I end up taking a ton of points in Prot. I think I've been able to whittle it down to a 5/56/10 setup so as to grab Seals of the Pure while still taking the Prot talents I really like and +5% Parry from Ret. I'll have to play around a little more, though.

Despite Hammer of the Righteous, I'm not sold on the importance of AP/Weapon Damage over Spell Damage. What if Hammer of the Righteous isn't supposed to generate a large amount of scale-able threat?

I envision Hammer of Righteous doing one of two things.

With small groups of mobs and a focus on single target DPS, this can replace Consecration. Constantly Consecrating to hold a small group is mana intensive, and there's no return from Spiritual Attunement. Hammer of Righteous will allow you to do some threat (~200 threat without counting the "high threat") to the extra targets. This is plenty to keep you above the healers.

With larger groups, it is a complement to Consecration. As it is, AoE tanking consists of Holy Shield, Consecration... wait. Maybe you'll spread a bit of love with Seal/Judgement of Righteousness. Hammer of the Righteous adds something else to your rotation, spreading a little extra AoE threat around the group and using up those seconds of global cooldown.

I'd rather have a lot of Spellpower to help everything else scale than need to stack Str/AP to make this one ability scale.

Walkere, the other part, which I forgot to mention is that Strength becomes block value at a much higher rate than in TBC. Currently in WotLK, before talents:

2 Strength = 1 Block Value

Shield of Righteousness works off Block Value. Toss in Divine Strength and Shield Specialization, and all our talents for blocking (Redoubt, Holy Shield), and Strength will go a large way to both reducing damage and increasing threat.

As well, there's no need to hit uncrushable anymore (I think), so you can gear for Stamina, which gives you threat (through SP) and health, and Strength, which gives you mitigation and threat.

You may already be aware of this post, Rohan, but as for the coefficients for SP and AP, check out Tybalt's post here.

And about said post, amongst his testing, Tybalt did find that HotR does scale with AP. Also, it appears to be bugged. That would probably account for the funky attacks that are showing up for you.

I expect the playstyle to be similar to tBC, but the gear to be vastly different on multiple fronts. Beyond just the obvious change brought on by HotR, all the Seals now scale with both AP and SP. Each Seal scales differently depending on which seal it is... for example, Seal of Blood/the Martyr scales better with AP than SP, while Seal of Righteousness scales better with SP than AP. This will further allow AP to benefit someone who's gearing up that way, even if they choose not to use Seal of Blood/the Martyr (what I consider to be the ideal tanking seal).

Some people theorize that high level multi-mob tanking will be better off with a SP weapon. I'm not discounting this point since Consecration still scales 100% with spell power. In a situation like that, if a SP weapon is the better option one would swap to SoR. Addendum: It is unlikely they will add anymore SP plate with tanking stats, and the lack of tanking stats on them will make them very bad choices for tanking, even if they have gobs of STA on them.